Month: February 2019

Someday you will find yourself standing on a sun washed field, a freshening breeze in your face, wishing you had a boomerang in hand just to see if the rumors are true.

Engineers call the boomerang an unbalanced airfoil, with one side flat and one side curved like an airplane wing.  Thrown into the wind the spinning boomerang will arc out and gradually curve.  As it slows it will head back toward you, and if you are lucky will slow to a stop above you and drop into your waiting hand.

Thrown improperly the boomerang will arc up and up until it reaches a great height, where upon it will come accelerating back toward you causing you and your friends to scatter to safety, lest this whirling harbinger of doom hunt you down and deliver a mighty blow.  I got whacked once or twice back in the day, much to the merriment of my brothers.           

Such a simple little machine that lets us ride the winds of physics, all the way home.       

 

Every once in a while I decide to try some new thing — scuba diving for example.  Thus, around age 40 I decided to see if I could learn to juggle.  After all I reasoned, if all those folks I saw on the teevee could do it, how hard could it be?

Pretty dad-gummed hard as it turned out.  Not as hard as say, solving Maxwell’s equations, but right up there with playing Snookers well or baking a perfect souffle’. 

The best kind of juggling balls are these squarish little bean-bags filled with sand.  I acquired a set from a toy store in Singapore, and they came with a helpful guide oddly called: How To Juggle.  I was on my way!

These little dudes have the right size and weight AND when you drop them they don’t go rolling away to the far corners of the room.  And drop them you will, several hundred times until you finally get the pattern of catch and release.  I eventually got to the point of being able to juggle three balls for a few minutes, much to the delight and amazement of my kids who gazed upon me as a kind of superhero.  “Mission accomplished”, thought ‘The Juggler’ as he melted into the shadows, beanbags at the ready, senses laser-focused on the rise of villainy.

I ultimately climbed all the way to the level of rank amateur.  I would watch experts juggling 4, 5, 6 or 7 things at once.  One guy could do one-handed juggling whilst eating an apple with his free hand.  Folks would juggle knives or flaming torches and some performers could do synchronized juggling, flipping bowling pins back and forth between them, never missing a beat.  

For my next trick, watch me juggle these perfect souffle’s with one hand whilst playing expert snookers with the other, and still having the time to glare menacingly at Maxwell and his pesky equations.

Finally, it would be cool to juggle a certain purple vegetable, and then tell folks that you never missed a BEET!   Bada bing bada boom. 

 

The physics are clear
Gravity and torque
Bring delight to all
You see it in the faces
Of children young and old.

At least two must play
Singularities insufficient
You await a partner
To begin the game
That lasts as long
As patience asks;
Even forever
If you like.

For simple machines,
We are the seeds,
The universe gives
Forces in balance
Giving and taking
The yin, the yang,
The you, the I.

 

 

 

Now and then I write about the walks my daughter and I share in the woods at Eno River State Park, 4200 acres of protected habitat nestled between Durham and Hillsborough.  These rambles have become a tradition, as we speak in hushed tones in a forest more familiar and vast than an ancient abbey or soaring cathedral.  Here the markings of man upon the earth do not jar the senses; rather, they blend with nature and appear as primal and common as a beaver dam or eagle’s nest.

We see the ruins of an old house back in the woods off the trail and move to investigate.

In its prime we imagine this house full of life, of crops to harvest and children to teach and fences to mend.  Seated high above the Eno River the sound of rushing water echoes as a symphony among the trees.  In the gloaming the creatures of the night must appear, taking their place upon the land while others dream of sunrise. 

We walk in the shadow of years and stand where the front porch used to be, sensing the lives that came before and sharing memories past and dreams to come.  The old house stands as a reminder of the fleeting nature of things and paradoxically, their permanence.  The forest reclaims its own, implacable and kind.  Renewal offers a timeless glimpse of ourselves, alive in all things, then and now.